Money Matters: Understanding Billing in Google Cloud Storage
*Check out the updated version of this post, here*
So far in Cloud Storage Bytes series, we’ve talked a lot about how to use Google Cloud Storage; from managing data to optimizing performance. But there’s one important topic that we haven’t talked about: the price tag.
Money matters
Have you ever gone grocery shopping while hungry and ended up spending way more than you budgeted?
I find that a list can be helpful here, so I don’t overestimate my snack requirements. This kind of planning can be helpful with Cloud Storage, too! Just like when grocery shopping, it’s a good idea to predict and track your data usage so you can better anticipate your monthly costs.
Since Cloud Storage billing is a bit more complex than grocery shopping, we’ll need to take a closer look at what we mean by “Pricing”.
Pricing is a compilation of several components:
- Data Storage
- Networking
- Operations
- Retrieval fees
- Early Deletion fees
Each of these components has its own pricing tables that show pricing based on factors such as region and operation type. This means that each company’s total cost is going to be very unique needs based upon its specific requirements. As much as I’d like to tell you exactly what your bottom line will be, I can’t. Instead, I can give an overview of each pricing category using my company: Jen’s Jams.
Suppose I have the following storage usage pattern in a given month:
Let’s find out how much my company will pay!
Data storage costs
The first two lines are in the data storage category. Data storage costs apply to the at-rest storing of your data in Cloud Storage.
For a quick refresher, “at rest” means that the data is physically on the disk itself, and not somewhere in transit throughout the network, or only temporarily housed there.
Regional and Multi-Regional Storage
Regional or Multi-Regional storage is appropriate for storing data that is frequently accessed, such as serving website content, interactive workloads, or data supporting mobile and gaming applications. For Jen’s Jams we’ve picked Multi-Regional because we have customers around the world.
My company’s cost for multi-region storage is $0.026 per GB, so the total cost for multi-regional storage this month is $1,597.44. The majority of my company’s music is held in multi-region storage so that each song is as accessible as possible.
The next expense in the chart is also data storage, but instead of Multi-Regional, it’s for Nearline Storage.
Nearline Storage
Nearline Storage is a low-cost, highly durable storage service for storing infrequently accessed data. It’s a better choice than Multi-Regional Storage or Regional Storage in scenarios where slightly lower availability, a 30-day minimum storage duration, and costs for data access are acceptable trade-offs for lowered storage costs.
Nearline Storage is ideal for data you plan to read or modify on average once a month or less. For example, if you want to continuously add files to Cloud Storage and plan to access those files once a month for analysis, Nearline Storage is a great choice. Nearline Storage is also appropriate for data backup, disaster recovery, and archival storage.
At Jen’s Jams, we use nearline storage to back up our music collection in the event that a song gets lost. I also use nearline storage for songs that are rarely downloaded.
Nearline Storage for the US multi-region location is $0.010 per GB, so the total cost is $1024.00. Notice that this is less than the total cost of multi-regional storage even though I am storing more data.
Next up in my pricing table is network costs.
Network costs
Network usage charges apply when an object or object metadata is read from your buckets. That is, egress. The cost depends on several factors and includes caveats, for example, circumstances like network egress within GCP. For example, data egress from your bucket to a non-Cloud Storage GCP service is free if
your bucket is located in a region, the GCP service is located in a multi-region, and both locations are on the same continent. So accessing data in a us-east1 bucket with a us App Engine instance would be free.
My company’s egress falls under general network usage, so none of the special cases apply. Note that network ingress is free.
Operation costs
An operation is an action that makes changes to or retrieves information about buckets and objects in Cloud Storage.
Operations are divided into three categories: Class A, Class B, and free. As you can see from the chart below, there’s a lot to each of these categories.
Costs for operations vary by operation class and storage class. In my case, the Class A operations are in Multi-region storage, so the cost is $0.05 per 10,000 operations. There are Class B operations in Multi-regional storage data and Nearline storage data, which are priced differently. Thus, my totals are $4.00 and $1.00, respectively.
Nearline fees
Because Nearline Storage and Coldline Storage are intended for storing infrequently accessed data, there are additional costs associated with retrieving data or metadata stored in these classes, as well as minimum storage durations that you are charged for.
But more about that in the documentation.
The total
There you have it! A month of my company’s Cloud Storage usage comes out to a total of $7460.22.
There is quite a bit more to billing than what we’ve discussed here, and prices may change after this blog is posted, so be sure to check out the documentation for the most up-to-date pricing information.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!
